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Saturday, December 13, 2014

Submitted by IWB, on December 13th, 2014

Much of Sweden’s fixed-line broadband became collateral damage as a result of a DDoS attack on a mystery gaming site this week.

While DDoS attacks are par for the course for most online businesses these days, the vast majority of these attacks don’t go on to affect the broadband connections of an entire country. But that’s what happened to customers of Telia, Sweden’s largest ISP, for 45 minutes on Tuesday night and then again intermittently throughout Wednesday afternoon and evening.

Telia hasn’t said how many of its 1.2 million residential subscribers were affected by outages but has confirmed the attack knocked out fixed-line broadband, digital TV, and VoIP connections.

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Telia released a statement on Wednesday night highlighting the fact that it had resolved the problem and is now investigating the source of the attack.

The recent DDoS attacks impacting Swedish cable, Internet and mobile service provider, TeliaSonera is another grim reminder of the impact a DDoS attack can have not only on the business itself, but the 5 million subscribers that were left without service, and left “Sweden not working”, as TeliaSonera’s CEO Johan Dennelind has stated publically.

There are a few unique points to take away from this particular attack. The sheer scale of Internet, mobile and cable operators network infrastructure and massive customer base presents an incredibly attractive attack surface. With multiple entry points and significant aggregate bandwidth available make these providers one of the most vulnerable targets for DDoS attacks.